Promptly at 10:00 a.m. PST today, Apple CEO Tim Cook took the stage at the "Town Hall" auditorium to begin the long-awaited presentation and introduction of the new iPhone. "This is my first product launch since being named CEO. I'm sure you didn't know that," Cook joked, obviously less engaging and charming than Steve Jobs, but still enjoyable to watch on the big stage.

But before we got to the new hardware, there was ample time - per tradition - for some self-congratulatory remarks about the company's growth in recent months. Praise and exaltation aside, attention soon shifted to Apple's new mobile operating system - iOS 5. Until today, we simply knew that it was coming this fall. Now we have a definite release date: October 12th.

Taking the stage to dish on some of the attributes of iOS 5 was Eddy Cue, Apple's senior vice president of Internet Software and Services. Despite feeling like somewhat of a rehash from early summer's WWDC, iOS 5 was heralded in all its glory, with Cue confirming that iCloud is free for iOS 5 and Lion users. 5GB of online data will be free, with users having the option to purchase additional data storage.

Cue also confirmed that iTunes Match will be available before the end of October, once again largely reiterating that which we already knew.

New iOS releases just aren't as exciting as they used to be. Gonna be hard to top the release of iOS 3 and iOS 4 as I think those iOS's were the biggest breakthroughs in iOS history. Now a day's iOS releases are nothing but a buncha copycat features of Jailbreak apps

So no iPhone 5. Whatever, more money I can save. What I want to know is how many of these features aren't available for the current iPhone 4? You can't tell me Apple is making all of this available at no charge. I'm guessing "Siri" isn't going to work with the inferior iPhone 4's hardward right?